[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Even Digital Memories Can Fade

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Surprising and troubling.
Peace,
Bill

swiggard at comcast.net


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Even Digital Memories Can Fade

November 10, 2004
 By KATIE HAFNER 



 

The nation's 115 million home computers are brimming over
with personal treasures - millions of photographs, music of
every genre, college papers, the great American novel and,
of course, mountains of e-mail messages. 

Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic
materials for the next decade, much less for the ages. Like
junk e-mail, the problem of digital archiving, which seems
straightforward, confounds even the experts. 

"To save a digital file for, let's say, a hundred years is
going to take a lot of work," said Peter Hite, president of
Media Management Services, a consulting firm in Houston.
"Whereas to take a traditional photograph and just put it
in a shoe box doesn't take any work." Already, half of all
photographs are taken by digital cameras, with most of the
shots never leaving a personal computer's hard drive. 

So dire and complex is the challenge of digital
preservation in general that the Library of Congress has
spent the last several years forming committees and issuing
reports on the state of the nation's preparedness for
digital preservation. 

Jim Gallagher, director for information technology services
at the Library of Congress, said the library, faced with "a
deluge of digital information," had embarked on a
multiyear, multimillion-dollar project, with an eye toward
creating uniform standards for preserving digital material
so that it can be read in the future regardless of the
hardware or software being used. The assumption is that
machines and software formats in use now will become
obsolete sooner rather than later. 

"It is a global problem for the biggest governments and the
biggest corporations all the way down to individuals," said
Ken Thibodeau, director for the electronic records archives
program at the National Archives and Records
Administration. 

In the meantime, individual PC owners struggle in private.
Desk drawers and den closets are filled with obsolete
computers, stacks of Zip disks and 3½-inch diskettes, even
the larger 5&#188-inch floppy disks from the 1980's. Short
of a clear solution, experts recommend that people copy
their materials, which were once on vinyl, film and paper,
to CD's and other backup formats. 

But backup mechanisms can also lose their integrity.
Magnetic tape, CD's and hard drives are far from robust.
The life span of data on a CD recorded with a CD burner,
for instance, could be as little as five years if it is
exposed to extremes in humidity or temperature. 

And if a CD is scratched, Mr. Hite said, it can become
unusable. Unlike, say, faded but readable ink on paper, the
instant a digital file becomes corrupted, or starts to
degrade, it is indecipherable. 

"We're accumulating digital information faster than we can
handle, and moving into new platforms faster than we can
handle," said Jeffrey Rutenbeck, director for the Media
Studies Program at the University of Denver. 

Professional archivists and librarians have the resources
to duplicate materials in other formats and the expertise
to retrieve materials trapped in obsolete computers. But
consumers are seldom so well equipped. So they are forced
to devise their own stopgap measures, most of them
unwieldy, inconvenient and decidedly low-tech. 

Philip Cohen, the communications officer at a nonprofit
foundation in San Francisco, is what archivists call a
classic "migrator." Since he was in elementary school, Mr.
Cohen, 33, has been using a computer for his school work,
and nearly all of his correspondence has been in e-mail
since college. 

Now Mr. Cohen's three home computers are filled with tens
of thousands of photos, songs, video clips and
correspondence. 

Over the years, Mr. Cohen, who moonlights as a computer
fix-it man, has continually transferred important files to
ever newer computers and storage formats like CD's and
DVD's. "I'll just keep moving forward with the stuff I'm
sentimental about," he said. 

Yet Mr. Cohen said he had noticed that some of his CD's,
especially the rewritable variety, are already beginning to
degrade. "About a year and a half ago they started to
deteriorate, and become unreadable," he said. 

And of course, migration works only if the data can be
found, and with ever more capacious hard drives, even that
can be a problem. 

"Some people are saying digital data will disappear not by
being destroyed but by being lost," Dr. Rutenbeck said.
"It's one thing to find the photo album of your trip to
Hawaii 20 years ago. But what if those photos are all
sitting in a subdirectory in your computer?" 

For some PC users, old machines have become the equivalent
of the bin under the bed. This solution, which experts call
the museum approach to archiving, means keeping obsolete
equipment around the house. 

Simon Yates, an analyst at Forrester Research, for example,
keeps his old PC in the back of a closet underneath a box.
The machine contains everything in his life from the day he
married in 1997 to the day he bought his new computer in
2002. If he wanted to retrieve anything from the old PC,
Mr. Yates said, it would require a great deal of wiring and
rewiring. "I'd have to reconfigure my entire office just to
get it to boot up," he said. 

Peter Schwartz, chairman of the Global Business Network,
which specializes in long-range planning, says that a
decade or two from now, the museum approach might be the
most feasible answer. 

"As long as you keep your data files somewhat readable
you'll be able to go to the equivalent of Kinko's where
they'll have every ancient computer available," said Mr.
Schwartz, whose company has worked with the Library of
Congress on its preservation efforts. 

"It'll be like Ye Olde Antique Computer Shoppe," he said.
"There's going to be a whole industry of people who will
have shops of old machines, like the original Mac Plus." 

Until that approach becomes commercially viable, though,
there is the printout method. 

Melanie Ho, 25, a graduate student at the University of
California, Los Angeles, has been using computers since
elementary school. She creates her own Web sites and she
spends much of her day online. 

Yet she prints important documents and stores a backup set
at her parents' house 100 miles away. 

"As much as a lot of people think print will be dead
because of computers," she said, "I actually think there's
something about the tangibility of paper that feels more
comforting." 

Proponents of paper archiving grow especially vocal when it
comes to preserving photographs. If stored properly,
conventional color photographs printed from negatives can
last as long as 75 years without fading. Newer photographic
papers can last up to 200 years. 

There is no such certainty for digital photos saved on a
hard drive. 

Today's formats are likely to become obsolete and future
software "probably will not recognize some aspects of that
format," Mr. Thibodeau said. "It may still be a picture,
but there might be things in it where, for instance, the
colors are different." 

The experts at the National Archives, like those at the
Library of Congress, are working to develop uniformity
among digital computer files to eliminate dependence on
specific hardware or software. 

One format that has uniformity, Mr. Thibodeau pointed out,
is the Web, where it often makes no difference which
browser is being used. 

Indeed, for many consumers, the Web has become a popular
archiving method, especially when it comes to photos. 

Shutterfly.com and Ofoto .com have hundreds of millions of
photographs on their computers. Shutterfly keeps a backup
set of each photo sent to the site. 

The backups are stored somewhere in California "off the
fault line," said David Bagshaw, chief executive of
Shutterfly. 

But suppose a Web-based business like Shutterfly goes out
of business? 

Mr. Bagshaw said he preferred to look on the bright side,
but offered this bit of comfort: "No matter what the
business circumstances, we'll always make people's images
available to them." 

Constant mobility can be another issue. 

Stephen Quinn,
who teaches journalism at Ball State University in Muncie,
Ind., moves frequently because of his work. He prefers to
keep the amount of paper in his life to a minimum, and
rarely makes printouts. 

Dr. Quinn keeps a box in the bottom drawer of his desk that
contains an eclectic set of storage disks dating back to
the early 1980's, when he started out on an Amstrad
computer. 

All of Dr. Quinn's poetry ("unpublished and unpublishable"
he says) and other writings are on those various digital
devices, along with his daily diaries. 

At some point, he wants to gather the material as a
keepsake for his children, but he has no way to read the
files he put on the Amstrad disks more than 20 years ago. 

He has searched unsuccessfully for an Amstrad computer.


"I have a drawer filled with disks and no machinery to read
it with," Dr. Quinn said. 

That is becoming a basic problem of digital life. Whatever
solution people might use, it is sure to be temporary. 

"We will always be playing catch up," said Dr. Rutenbeck,
who is working at pruning his own digital past, discarding
old hard drives and stacks of old Zip disks. 

"It feels really good to do," he said, "just like I didn't
keep a box of everything I did in first grade." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/10/technology/10archive.html?ex=1101083905&ei=1&en=896bd7279f928052


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